Thursday

+ DISJECTA MEMBRA -

a}Just noticed that in a review for the next issue of The Wire I describe junk addiction as being, in its unglamorous Real, something like: "2am TV on endless REPEAT".
A not uncommon analogy, as it happens. {Or, for all that doesn't happen.} Whichever one of the Deal sisters it was had the bad {what, as opposed to the good} smack habit memorably {or memorably to me, at the time} described it along the lines of a hole in your life which felt like you'd just been sat slumped "watching TV for ten years". And Billie Holiday said she only (ever) knew she had kicked her habit[s] when her TV habit also dissipated: IMAGE HUNGER oh yes.

b}Just discovered that a song on one of SAM PHILLIPS albums is called "Faster Pussycat ... To The Library!" - which has got to be worth a wholly whimsical honorary PawGirlship. I think maybe I should make it one of my missions in life to ensure that far more people own some of her work - CRUEL INVENTION especially - than already do; I get the vague impression from a qwick Webflick that her profile is a notch or two higher in homeland USA {she even got a Grammy nomination for 1994's Martinis & Bikinis, whatever that signifies - altho I'd give it one for the title alone, not to mention the {I think} subtitle of 1996's OMNIPOP: It's Only a Flesh Wound, Lambchop ...} and one Website even supplies the truly outta leftfield tidbit that she had a stalk-on part in Die Hard With A Vengeance playing a mute knife-wielding terrorist ...
But I've already to my certain knowledge got two people to hunt down copies of Cruel Invention which I still cannot stop playing relentlessly as Great Summer Pop Album ... in the sun in the car in my dreaming head ... and tempted tho' I am to bore you all to brittle Pillbox rock with ALL my favourite quotes thereof, one especially pushes itself forward as contender:

un-invent the wheel of endless greed
let conscience run like a river like a dreamer

which, if Walter B. hadn't already taken the bridge occupied the zone planted the thematic flag w/ his pithy "CULTURE and BARBARITY" couplet could serve well as an alternate PILL BOX motto, don't you know ... LET CONSCIENCE RUN LIKE A RIVER LIKE A DREAMER ... well, yes. Yes, yes.

c}LET CONSCIENCE RUN LIKE A RIVER LIKE A DREAMER ... : that new Lester Bangs compilation. Outrageously astonishingly head turningly thought provokingly paradigm upsettingly good. He disses the Beatles. He writes beautifully about Charlie Haden and Charlie Mingus and Free Jazz in general. He explores his love of Bukowski. He bigs up Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" and Alicia Bridges "I Love The Nightlife" {as better and more honest than most Punk Rock!!!!} He inspects his soul.
Music writing wise, he is Robert Bresson to today's office junior careerist sub-Guy Ritchie hacks. Delivery boys, clerks, category managers, who don't deserve to be printed on the same form of pulped Nature as this man. And not because he was some balls-out NOISEnik freakshow barker, but because he understood hope and love and dreams and frailty and falsehood and trying to grow up and failing and starting all over again, from a cold hurting hellish NOWHERE.
Critic/musician: the distinction collapses in the best pieces here; because his writing SINGS, and sings in a way that actually, when it comes right down to it, probably 50% of even the better people he wrote about will never even get close to in terms of moral nuance and daring and OPEN HEART reach.
So there.
{And if you're wondering why I'm not making with the pithy illustrative quotes if it's so damned good, it's because I supect that if I started I might never stop ...}

d}... and you know what, it's not even as if I wouldn't gladly pay £17.87 for something heart-meltingly brain-strokingly special {if I knew it wuz coming ...}, becoz, of course, we do it all the time, but the IRK here was that the charge was for the BROKERAGE + V.A.T, not the musick per se ... and there's just something about that word brokerage, you know ... ?
... and believe me, not being a real Industry Insider type guy I get sent FAR fewer things than some of you probably assume ... although of course sometimes you do get sent something completely out of the blue and it is truly sublime ...
... and NEUROT RECORDINGS out of San Francisco have sent me some lovely perplexing bewitching things in the past {fascinating CDs by both Vitriol and Amber Asylum e.g.}, and have continued to do so even tho' I don't think they've got a single 'offical' review out of me yet ...*
... I'd like to write more about this new one they just sent me {NO brokerage charge,NO +V.A.T.!}, but right now just a name check for Culper Ring and their LOVELY shivery unsettling entrancing 355 CD ... and if, say, you like the Current 93 side of things, you'lll LOVE this as much as I already do, only two listenings in ...

{*altho, see a certain Pill Boxpassim, er, a couple of months ago I think, when I truly hallelujah'd a track called "Twin Stars" by BEE AND FLOWER off their Neurot CD what's mine is yours.

+ ---- -

... and, HEY hu-up, time to roll the Trinitron mat up n off and take my daily TV-detox methadone glug of The Simpsons ... which, as synchronicity would have it, is a Lisa's Blues one all about how lo brow can u go Reality TV-led cultural DUMBING DOWN ...

- ---- +

... and finally: the PB's thoughts & prayers are with D.T. right now, in reference and dedication to his missing/hurting cats. Maybe the Pill Box's attestably lovely & truly good & decent readers might do something similar today or tonight or tomorrow: just some simple, Sufic open heart exercise, a silent pause for this p.b.'s totem animal ... our little feral Familiars ... whether they are hurt or healing, lost or scared... some love.